What is happening in India. today is an attempt to replace the
liberal bourgeois State by a fascist State, which its proponents call
Hindu Rashtra. What is worrisome about this attempt is that the
fascists who wish to effect this change are also occupying the leading
position within the liberal bourgeois State itself. As a result the
"dual power" that characterises all such transitional periods shows
itself in our context not as a conflict between the existing State and
the State-in-the-process-of-becoming, but the latter together with
powerful elements of the existing State on'one side against the residual
elements of the existing State on the other. This makes the situation
extremely precarious: important battles are decided almost on the toss
of a coin, such as for instance the Supreme Court decision in mid-March
not to allow shilanyas on the disputed site in Ayodhya. (The
decision could, quite conceivably, have gone the other way and given a
big boost to the fascists). To be sure, the fascists are as yet far from
acquiring the strategic strength to effect a change: their support among
the masses, quite inadequate to start with, has been dwindling fast. But
any complacency on account of this in the face of their offensive can be
dangerous.

An important weapon in this offensive is the denigration of the basic
principles of the existing State, such as secularism. And in this
denigration the fascists have the benefit of making use of the
intellectual contribution of a host of other, non-fascist, tendencies.
The view that secularism, in the sense of a separation of religion from
politics, is a "Western import", "alien to the Indian soil", does not
emanate from the fascists. It has, unfortunately, more respectable
intellectual pedigree. And in this context Gandhi's name is often
dragged in as a believer in an alternative paradigm of "secularism" (if
one can call it that), different from the "Western version". We feel
particularly glad therefore to publish in the current number of
Social Scientist an article by Kumkum Sangari which explores
Gandhi's ideas on the subject, and their evolution, and in the process
dispels many of the myths that have been built up around it.

We are also witnessing in India today the absurd phenomenon of
enormous,foodgrain stocks coexisting with mass hunger. This

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phenomenon is used by the Bretton Woods institutions and economists
under their hegemony to push for the adoption of a neo-liberal agenda in
India's food economy. Some of the arguments advanced by them are the
following: a point of saturation has been reached in the matter of
meeting the food demand of the Indian people, so that now there should
be diversification of land away from foodgrains to export crops; the
high stocks are the result of high procurement prices which reflect the
danger of having large-scale State intervention in the foodgrain market
and call for a withdrawal of the State from this sphere; the Food
Corporation of India is an unwieldy and inefficient body and the
management of the food economy should be removed from its hands and left
to the state governments; and so on. Madhura Swaminathan's Daniel
Thorner Memorial lecture discusses all these issues. It presents a
powerful and cogent critique of the neo-liberal prescriptions for
India's food economy, and outlines an alternative vision.

Margit Koves's paper is concerned with an apparent paradox central to
the globalization process, namely globalization of the economic realm is
associated simultaneously with the growth of narrow identity politics.
The paper discusses the exploration of this dialectic in contemporary
Hungarian literature, focussing on the work of two authors, Kertesz and
Esterhazy. We also publish in this number a short paper by Prabhat
Patnaik which was presented at a seminar at the CIEFL, Hydeabad, and
which takes a fresh look at Marx's critique of Classical Political
Economy.

Finally, Professor Satish Chandra's paper which constitutes the text
of his Haksar Memorial Lecture was supposed to have appeared in the last
number of Social Scientist, and the editorial note of that number
had even introduced the paper. By an oversight however it did not get
included in that issue. We apologize for the mistake and are including
it in the current number.